Cochlear implants are the first device to successfully restore neural function. They have instigated a popular but controversial revolution in the treatment of deafness, and they serve as a model for research in neuroscience and biomedical engineering. After a visual tour of the physiology of natural hearing the function of cochlear implants will be described in the context of electrical engineering, psychophysics, clinical evaluation, and my own personal experience. The audience will have the opportunity to experience speech and music heard through a cochlear implant. The social implications of cochlear implantation and the future outlook for auditory prostheses will also be discussed.

Bio：

Ian Shipsey is renowned for the elucidation of the physics of beauty and charm quarks. He was elected as the co-spokesperson of the CLEO/CLEO-c experiments three times. He constructed key CLEO instrumentation including the muon detector, and took a leading role in the design and fabrication of the CLEO-III silicon vertex detector.

Joining the CMS experiment at the LHC he became quarkonia coordinator. He and his group made the first LHC Upsilon cross-section measurement, observed Upsilon suppression in heavy-ion collisions, and observed the very-rare B_S→μ^+ μ^- decay. He took a leading role in the production of the Forward-Pixel detector. He was co-coordinator of the LHC Physics Center at Fermilab, and was elected CMS Collaboration Board Chair in 2013. He joined the ATLAS experiment at the LHC in 2016. He works in Higgs physics and is a member of the HL-LHC ATLAS tracker (ITk) pixel group. 

Outside of collider physics, Prof. Shipsey has been part of the LSST camera team since 2008, and twice elected a member of the Board of Directors of the LSST Corporation. He is a member of the Mu3e experiment CMOS HVMAPS tracker team and the PI of the Quantum Sensors for Fundamental Physics Consortium in the UK.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and The UK Institute of Physics (IoP).  He was a Chairperson of the American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields from 2011-2014. He received the 2019 IoP James Chadwick Medal and Prize for his contributions to particle physics.

Ian has been profoundly deaf since 1989. In 2002 he heard the voice of his daughter for the first time, and his wife's voice for the first time in thirteen years thanks to a cochlear implant. He has given almost one hundred colloquia and talks to the public on bionic hearing and perception since the miracle of a cochlear implant restored his hearing in 2003.